Labour will is to set out plans to force bus companies to provide more frequent services and introduce new routes in the countryside if rural communities want them.

And speaking to us, Maria Eagle, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of state for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said the changes would be introduced whatever the views of North East bus companies.

She said that bus firms in the region had likened her to “Stalin or Hitler” for backing changes to the way services are run - but that there would be no backing down.

The measures are part of Labour’s rural manifesto, which it is calling a “plan for rural Britain”.

Labour is promising to improve pay rates in rural areas by improving skills and raising the minimum wage, and to force supermarkets to pay fair prices to farmers by expanding the role and powers of the Groceries Code Adjudicator.

The manifesto includes a promise to “give rural communities more power over their own bus services” by allowing councils to determine routes.

This will apply across the country but will be particularly significant in the North East, where the North East Combined Authority has already drawn up plans to set ticket prices, routes and timetables across Tyne and Wear and on some routes in and out of County Durham and Northumberland.

Bus firms oppose the scheme, saying it is unaffordable.

But Ms Eagle, a former Shadow Transport Secretary, said: “They’ve got a bit of form, some of the bus companies in the North East, when anybody suggests any kind of restraint and co-operation at all.

“I can recall when I was Shadow Transport being accused of being a combination of Stalin and Hitler and various other people who were not exactly democrats for wanting to get value for money for the subsidy that is put into our bus services.”

Labour would give councils the power to regulate bus services so they could design bus routes that suit their area, she said.

“At the moment what happens is that the subsidy goes in once the operators have decided where they are running services.

“What they tend to do - and one doesn’t blame them; it’s the system - they will optimise the service they provide in order to maximise the subsidy they can extract.”

She added: “Nobody is suggesting you will end up in rural areas with the same level of service as you get in central london. But you will get a more coherent set of bus services that suit the needs of local communities.”

She also suggested that increasing wages and skills in rural areas would prevent a “race to the bottom” and improve the quality of food in supermarkets.

Maria Eagle said: “In rural areas we have a concentration of low pay and poor skills and productivity in many of the jobs that are available.

“Low skills... can feed its way through into putting our food chain at risk,” she said.

Average wages are over £4500 lower a year than those in urban areas and the gap has grown by £1000 since 2010, Labour says.

Other pledges include building more affordable homes; bringing the off-grid energy sector under the remit of the regulator for the first time; cutting business rates for small businesses, which employ over two-thirds of the rural workforce, and ensuring that all parts of the country benefit from affordable, high-speed broadband by the end of the Parliament.